History of Horror

History of Horror

Horror is a type of film, a specific genre in which it seeks to receive a response from the audience such as scaring them or receiving negative emotional reactions. Frequent themes of horror are macabre, which is a horrifying atmosphere, and supernatural which is not subject to the laws of physics, going beyond nature.

Horror in the 1980’s began with Alien in 1979 and it was the era where special visual effects began to reinvent gory imaginings of both horror fans and movie makers. Behind the camera, people started using animatronics and liquid latex, allowing them to create supernatural looking scenes and distorting humans in a new way. One iconic use of the animatronic was Rick Bakers work in An American Werewolf in London, where they created an animatronic for use of the famous transformation scene. Using an animatronic for this scene allowed the producers to show the audience what would happen to a human’s muscles and bones in this situation and how painful it would be. This scene turned out to have one of the most realistic appearing werewolf transformation scenes and in the time, CG effects were expensive and practical effects were the way to succeed.

During this decade, horror films delivered full colour close-up special effect, something previous practitioners could only wish to do.  1980’s Horror produce a new energy and delight in the genre, as special effects were creating sequences in horror films that had never been attempted in film history.

Some films show no monsters at all, such as Cat People, The Blair Witch Project managed to scare the audience through suggestion, providing triggers for the audiences own imagination and then having them end up scaring themselves. Yet other films take the visceral approach, showing images of body horror to produce a physical reaction of fear and challenging the audience to keep watching despite the revulsion. Zombie films also had a huge comeback in this decade, as films such as Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Brain Dead (1990) show this. Research and experiments on the effects of violence in films have shown that even hardened viewers find it difficult to watch a surgical operation, as the insides of our own bodies produce a repulsive outcome. In these terms, audiences of horror have hardened throughout the years as the Hays code, a set of industry moral censorship guidelines brought out in 1930 ended in the 1968 and more body horror and violence has been shown in films since.

The Horror genre was a good box office business in this decade, as the main demographic was male 15-24 year olds, audiences seeking thrillers and also seeking to prove they’re strong enough to watch the movies. The reason this was the demographic in that decade was because movie studios believed this audience was attracted to violence, action, shock, sex and excess in everything.

Some Iconic films produced in the 1980’s are The Shining (1980), The Evil Dead (1981), Friday the 13^th (1980), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), An American Werewolf in London (1981), Evil Dead II (1987), The Changeling (1980), Day of the Dead (1985), Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) and so many more classics.

1980 was also a decade where some incidents became historical context used in films, this is as the incident is so disastrous and new to the world it scares the audiences, plays around with their fears and memories of the incident. Bologna Massacre and Ed Gein are only a couple of the many contexts.